Episode #220 - Did India's Thugs Really Exist? (Part I)

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Hey everyone, Sebastian here.

Just wanted to let you know that I will once again be participating in this year's Intelligent Speech Conference.

Deception, lies, fakery, fraudulence, and forgery is what they have on the docket for Intelligent Speech 2025.

So, obviously, I've got to be there.

For those that don't know, Intelligent Speech is an online conference that highlights the best in history history podcasting.

Intelligent Speech 2025 Deception will be taking place on the 8th of February 2025.

So if you want tickets, go to intelligent speechonline.com right now and get yourself to the conference.

If you had to guess, what would you say was Queen Victoria's favorite book?

It's a tricky question because the 19th century monarch was a voracious reader.

On top of her duties as the Queen of Great Britain and its globe-spanning empire, she managed to finish dozens of books every year.

And to her credit, she had fairly eclectic taste.

Her journals reveal that she was a bit of a history buff.

Lengthy tomes on the history of France, the coronations of English kings, and the lives of Roman generals were a big part of her literary diet.

She was also deeply curious about the geography of faraway places.

This no doubt went hand in hand with her interest in the expansion of her growing empire.

She read many books about places on the fringes of British control, with special attention paid to the manners and customs of people who might soon find themselves under the thumb of British administration.

But more than anything else, the Queen loved a good novel.

She rarely missed anything published by Charles Dickens and had a special affection for his novel Nicholas Nickleby.

She also spoke well of the author Dinah Craik and her novel John Halifax, Gentleman.

So, zeroing in on an all-time favorite book for the queen might be impossible.

However, you could make the case that one of Queen Victoria's favorite books also has one of the most surprising titles.

This was 1839's Confessions of a Thug.

Now, there's part of me that takes a certain anachronistic glee in imagining Queen Victoria, a woman who would eventually be known as the Grandmother of Europe, flipping through a novel called Confessions of a Thug.

It's like learning that Barbara Bush secretly loved Tupac Shakur.

But that comparison isn't actually fair.

As soon as you learn anything about Confessions of a Thug, it makes perfect sense why Britain's Queen was such an enthusiastic fan.

The book was a ripping adventure story that also purported to be a realistic depiction depiction of central Indian society.

Later scholars would call this ethnographic fiction, but it's perhaps better known simply as empire writing.

Queen Victoria a fan of empire writing?

Go figure.

But in this case, Queen Victoria didn't just have a passing interest in the book.

She was a legitimate super fan.

The book was published in three volumes between 1839 and 1840.

Apparently, Victoria was so keen to read the final volume that she couldn't wait for the book to be bound.

Using her royal privilege, the queen was personally delivered page proofs of the novel before it had been made into a proper book.

She was happy to shift through loose pages just so she didn't have to wait a minute longer to read the exciting conclusion of Confessions of a Thug.

So, what was this book?

The author was one Philip Meadows Taylor, a British administrator who had worked in India in the court of a prince who had become a client of the British East India Company.

As such, he believed himself to be an expert on the languages and customs of Central India.

His novel was presented as an unflinching examination of India's most notorious group of criminals, the murderous cultists known as thugs.

The reader was told that these were real highwaymen who terrorized the roadways of central India that had only recently come under British protection.

Their ritualistic crimes, known as thuggy, involved deceiving travelers, drugging them, strangling them, and then making off with all their victims' movable wealth.

Now, Taylor was clear that his book was a novel.

It was a fictionalized account that took the form of a long confession being related by a hardened thug named Amir Ali to his British interrogator.

In the novel, Amir Ali confessed to having murdered 750 people in the course of his career as a thug, and bragged that if he had not been caught, he would have easily killed 1,000.

According to the author, this detail was no exaggeration, as many real thugs who had been captured by the British boasted about astonishing body counts that often numbered in the hundreds.

Amir Ali may have been a fictional character, but Taylor explained that he was a composite of a number of real-life thugs who had been apprehended and deposed by the British authorities.

In the introduction to Confessions of a Thug, the author explained that, quote, the tale of crime which forms the subject of the following pages is, alas, almost all true.

What there is of fiction has been supplied only to connect the events and make the adventures of Amir Ali as interesting as the nature of his horrible profession would permit me.

End quote.

In other words, Taylor insisted that his novel was more or or less, based on a true story.

A few years earlier, another British administrator named William Henry Sleeman had undertaken a campaign to completely eradicate thuggy from central India.

His campaign largely hinged on information provided by captured thugs turned informers in return for royal pardons.

One of his key informers was a man identified only as Ferengaya, a former thug who confirmed all of Sleeman's worst fears about this nefarious criminal sect.

The roads of central India were not simply riddled with unaffiliated bandits stealing what they could at a time of political instability.

No, they had become the hunting grounds of an ancient cult of stranglers whose crimes were just as much about appeasing the bloodlust of their chosen deity as it was about enriching the members of the gang.

Ferengaya and the other thug informers gave Sleeman enough evidence to justify an uncompromising campaign of suppression, setting him on a path that culminated with roughly 4,000 accused thugs hanged or permanently exiled from their traditional home.

The so-called 1836 suppression of thuggy would go down as a a storied imperial flex in a region of the subcontinent that had remained stubbornly ungovernable.

The testimony of Sleeman's informers would eventually be published and would form the backbone of Taylor's Confessions of a Thug.

The life story of Taylor's Amir Ali was fairly close to the tale told by Ferengeia, with some sensational elements borrowed from the confessions of other admitted thugs, and a little bit of artistic license from the author himself.

Now, Taylor clearly thought the story was interesting, but he was genuinely surprised at just how successful his book became back in England.

It was an immediate bestseller, with stories about the Queen's enthusiasm only driving more interest towards confessions of a thug.

The novel clearly struck a nerve with the English reading public.

Not only was it a ripping yarn filled with bloody tales of murder, it also gave British readers a window into a part of the world that was becoming increasingly important to their growing empire.

It was fairly astounding that a British charter corporation had managed to gain control over huge swathes of the Indian subcontinent.

By the 1830s, the British East India Company was essentially acting as the government of a giant nation, with the actual British government becoming more deeply involved in the project by the day.

The average Briton was still learning the basics about India, and many were curious.

Confessions of a thug not only presented an exotic and exciting version of India, it also reinforced many growing stereotypes about the country, namely that it was a lawless and chaotic place, and that the people were inherently savage.

Significantly, the novel played into a narrative about the British Empire that was just starting to take shape in public discourse.

This was that the British were a civilizing force.

If we trust Taylor's novel, then before the arrival of the British, thuggy was rampant in India, and the thugs killed and robbed with impunity.

The only people who had managed to bring the thugs to heel were the administrators of the British East India Company.

Sure, the company was notoriously corrupt and exploitative, but if they got rid of the mass murdering thugs, well, they couldn't be all that bad.

As strange as it might sound, for British readers in the 1840s, the bloody and shocking confessions of a thug was, quietly, a feel-good story about British justice bringing peace to a previously untamed corner of the world.

The message clearly resonated, and the book was a hit.

The word thug became a permanent part of the English lexicon, eventually losing its association with the Indian group originally referred to and becoming a simple shorthand for any violent criminal.

But despite Taylor's insistence that his book was almost all true, many modern scholars have become skeptical.

Taylor wasn't lying when he said that much of his novel's content was drawn from the confessions of real thugs.

But those confessions may not be trustworthy sources.

Were these apprehended criminals simply telling the British authorities what they thought they wanted to hear in exchange for pardons and the protection of their families?

Was there a mix of truth and fiction in those confessions?

Or were some telling the truth while others were lying?

Philip Meadows Taylor was working from legitimate primary sources.

But what if the primary sources are full of lies?

That, my friends, is a recipe for some fake history.

Was thuggy the serious threat that the British authorities claimed it was in the 1830s?

Or, as some scholars have suggested, were the thugs little more than made-up colonial boogeymen?

Did I choose the thug life or did the thug life choose me?

Let's see what we can figure out today on our fake history.

One, two, three, five

Episode number 220.

Did India's Thugs Really Exist?

Part 1.

There's nothing better than a woman.

Hello and welcome to Our Fake History.

My name is Sebastian Major, and this is the podcast where we explore historical myths and try to determine what's fact, what's fiction, and what is such a good story that it simply must be told.

Before we get going this week, I just want to remind everyone that an ad-free version of this podcast is available through Patreon.

Just head to patreon.com/slash our fake history to get access to an ad-free feed and a ton of exclusive patrons-only extra episodes.

I've got a few things cooking up right now for the patrons.

We're talking hours and hours of our fake history extra goodness.

That will include the new extra episode on the Bronze Age collapse requested and voted on by the patrons, and a couple other things that are going to be coming in the meantime to keep my patrons nice and happy.

How's that for a tease?

So to get access to all the goodies, please head to patreon.com slash our fake history and find the level of support that works for you.

And while I've got you here, I'm going to throw out one more reminder about the Intelligent Speech Conference.

The 2025 conference is happening online on February 8th.

The conference is going to feature talks and roundtables from a number of great history podcasters.

Honestly, it is like the event if you are in to history podcasts.

I'm going to be giving a talk about fakes, hoaxes, and humbug artists from throughout history.

And I'm also going to be moderating a roundtable about myths about powerful women.

Because the Intelligent Speech Conference is online, you can enjoy it from the comfort of your own home just go to intelligentspeechonline.com and get tickets and then show up on February the 8th and check out everything I'm doing there and everything all the other awesome podcasters are going to be doing at the conference all right that's my last pitch for that one

this week we are headed to South Asia and the subcontinent of India.

In the nearly 10 years that I have now been doing this show, this is the very first time that I've focused an entire series on an Indian topic.

And to be honest, I'm a little embarrassed to say that out loud.

I've always wanted Our Fake History to feature stories from every part of the globe.

So it's downright scandalous that I have neglected one of the most populous and historically rich parts of the world up to this point.

Now, obviously, Indian history has come up before on the podcast, but I haven't managed to get around to an exclusively Indian topic.

Now, part of the reason for this is that the story of the Indian subcontinent is long,

complex, and requires an understanding of a vast array of cultural, religious, and language groups.

If you're new to Indian history, it can feel a bit overwhelming.

I was also hoping that the first time I featured India's history on the show, I would be able to focus on something outside of the colonial era.

India has been the home to countless vibrant civilizations dating back to the very earliest times.

That's not even to mention the major world religions that sprang out of the Indian context.

So, for me to jump right to a moment in history when India came under the thumb of a European colonial power seemed almost disrespectful.

The history teacher in me didn't like the idea of skipping past thousands of years of history and culture to jump to a moment when the Indian story was being folded into the story of the British Empire.

Unlike India, I've come back to the story of England time and time again on this show.

And there's a part of me that hoped that I could talk about the subcontinent without also talking about the British.

But the story of India's thuggy cult was just too interesting and frankly perfect for our fake history.

As some of you know, this topic was proposed as a candidate for the next patrons only episode.

Now, obviously, it did not win that poll.

But, to be honest, I was secretly rooting for it.

And that told me that I obviously had to do it, and maybe I just needed to do it on the regular feed.

The patrons have good ideas, and I'm not about to waste any of them.

So, you know, send me suggestions.

Your suggestions are good, people.

Now, if you're like me, you may have first encountered India's thuggy cult by way of Indiana Jones.

1984's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, co-created by Hollywood legends Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, was the follow-up to 1981's beloved Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Now, the second installment in the Indiana Jones series is, weirdly enough, a prequel to the first film.

To be honest, it took me years before I realized that fact.

Now, if you haven't seen Temple of Doom in a minute, Let me give you the rundown.

Set in 1935, the titular whip-cracking archaeologist Indiana Jones finds himself in British India, where he befriends a group of villagers who have been terrorized by a local thuggy cult.

It's up to Indy to infiltrate the hideout of the murderous cultists, retrieve a sacred stone, and save the village's kidnapped children.

As I'm sure many of you know, Temple of Doom is absolutely off the wall, even by Indiana Jones standards.

I mean, it's no kingdom of the crystal skull, but man, few things are.

Now, even in 1984, the film generated some controversy for its depictions of India.

A scene where an Indian prince serves the American heroes, eyeballs, and monkey brains, was deemed especially offensive by many Indian people, who argued that it reinforced ignorant stereotypes.

Just as objectionable was the depiction of the thuggy cult.

The thugs were shown to be fanatics whose perverted version of Hindu religion involved human sacrifice.

Easily, the most memorable moment in the film is when the high priest Mola Ram, leader of the thuggy, uses his bare hands to pull the still-beating heart out of the chest of a sacrificial victim.

These elements led to the film being banned in India around the time of its theatrical release.

Now, interestingly, years later, Amrish Puri, the beloved Indian film star who portrayed the thug leader, Mola Ram, pish-poshed the controversy in his home country, writing in his autobiography that the whole thing was blown out of proportion.

He argued that the movie's thuggy cult was, quote, based on an ancient cult that existed in India and was recreated like a fantasy, end

From Amrish Puri's perspective, the filmmakers certainly exaggerated things for cinematic effect, but the dark truth was that the thugs were real.

Or were they?

What Amrish Puri did not know when he was writing his autobiography is that the reality of the thugs is heavily debated among scholars who study Indian history.

The cult that appeared in Indiana Jones in the Temple of Doom reflected a media image with a 150-year-old history.

Steven Spielberg and George Lucas had always envisioned Indiana Jones as an homage to the adventure serials of their youth.

The Thugs in Temple of Doom were a glossy 80s update to the villainous thugs that appeared in the 1939 adventure film Gungadin.

The colonial adventure set in India was an obvious touchstone touchstone for both Spielberg and Lucas.

By 1939, thugs had already become well-known stock villains for stories set in India.

In the 1890s, a popular series of pirate stories, known as the Sandokan novels, written by the Italian author Emilio Salgari, featured the thugs as antagonists.

Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used the thugs to spice up his otherwise forgotten short story Uncle Jeremy's Household.

Similarly, a notorious thug shows up as a seductive but dangerous thief in the popular 1845 novel The Wandering Jew.

But all of these thugs find their genesis in 1839's Confessions of a Thug by Philip Meadows Taylor.

That was Queen Victoria's favorite book that we discussed in the introduction.

In 1984, Spielberg and Lucas were updating the long tradition of the literary thug.

And the literary thug begins with Philip Meadows Taylor.

In literature, Indian thugs have a number of key characteristics that separate them from run-of-the-mill bandits.

First, they are part of an organized fraternity.

They self-identify as thugs and see themselves as part of a distinct criminal culture.

Next, they are devoted to a destroyer goddess, often identified as the Hindu goddess Kali, but sometimes also identified as Durga or Bawani.

The key thug belief is that not only does this goddess protect them, but their murders are a form of devotion to the deity.

Then there is the thug modus operandi.

Thugs deceive their victims by posing as friendly fellow travelers along India's roadways, lulling their potential quarry into a false sense of security.

Sometimes, but not always, the thugs will employ drugs or poisons to incapacitate their marks.

Most importantly, the thugs always kill the people they plan to rob.

The practice of thuggy is not just robbery, it's murder, then robbery.

Finally, the thugs' preferred method of murder was strangulation.

In fiction, every thug carries a long cord or a scarf that they can quickly slip over the necks of their victims.

But does this literary thug reflect a historical reality?

Was there truly a group of self-identified thugs in India who fit the profile I just laid out?

Well, if you were to ask the British colonial officials operating in India in the 1830s, the answer was an unambiguous yes.

According to some British administrators, not only did the thugs exist, they presented one of the most serious threats to Indian law and order known at the time.

As I mentioned in the introduction, the novelist Philip Meadows Taylor based his book on official reports that recorded the confessions of a number of accused thugs.

If you're looking for historical evidence of thugs, you will find it in the archives of the British East India Company.

For decades, these reports were taken at face value.

and the historical reality of the thugs was taken for granted.

But then, around the 1960s, a new wave of scholars started advocating for a more critical reading of the colonial sources.

Historians like Hiralal Gupta, Stuart Gordon, Christopher Bailey, and Radhika Singha argued that the confessions of the alleged thugs who had been rounded up by the British in the 1830s could not be assumed to be 100% truthful.

On the contrary, many of these confessors were likely telling the authorities what they thought they wanted to hear.

Considering that many of the best-known and most often cited thug informers were given pardons for their cooperation, it should make a critical reader at least a little skeptical of their confessions.

Many of these confessions were made under duress or with a quid pro quo on the table.

On top of that, there's a lot of inconsistency between the informants when it comes to their descriptions of thuggy as a practice.

As such, this class of critical scholars argued that the thugs may not have actually existed.

Or, more precisely, they did not exist in the way that the British authorities said that they did.

From this perspective, the Indian thug was little more than a colonial invention, a useful boogeyman that helped justify a British crackdown on a a part of India that was proving difficult to govern.

For those scholars, the thugs were little more than a historical myth.

But in the decades since, the pendulum of scholarly opinion on thuggy has swung once again.

Around the early 2000s, a new batch of historians, chief among them Mike Dash, argued that that earlier class had over-corrected and had had unfairly erased the real thugs from history.

This reopened the debate on thugs that is still rippling in academic circles today.

Were the thugs purely the invention of power-hungry colonials?

Or was there a legitimate criminal fraternity committing murders by the hundreds in the early 19th century?

Well, that's what I hope to get to the bottom of over the course of this series.

So let's dive into it.

What evidence do we have for the existence of thugs?

How should we evaluate our colonial sources?

What stories are wild but true?

And which ones are pure historical myth?

Let's dive in.

On October 3rd, 1830, an anonymous letter was published in the Calcutta Literary Gazette, warning the citizens of the city of a terrifying threat to their safety.

In the central regions of the country, there lurked a community of stranglers devoted to the Hindu goddess Kali, for whom they performed horrific acts of murder.

The letter read

Kali's temple at Vindhyachal, a few miles west of Mirzapur on the Ganges River, is constantly filled with murderers from every quarter of India who go there to offer up in person a share of the booty they have acquired from their victims, strangled in their annual excursions.

The priests of this temple know perfectly the source source from which they derive their offerings and the motives from which they are made, and they promise the murderers in the name of their mistress immunity and wealth.

End quote.

The letter later continued, quote, it is an organization, system of religion, and civil polity prepared to receive converts from all religions and sects, and to urge them to murder their fellow creatures under the the assurance of high rewards in this world and the other.

It is the imperious duty of the supreme government of this country to put an end in some way or other to this dreadful system of murder by which thousands of human beings are now annually sacrificed upon every great road throughout India.

End quote.

For an anonymous letter published in a literary magazine, this little epistle made quite an impact.

It seems like it was read by almost every important East India Company official stationed in the country.

It was certainly not missed by the Governor General of India, who immediately asked for a plan of action concerning this cult of thugs terrorizing the country's roadways.

The very next day after the publication of the letter, an official campaign to eradicate thuggy from India was underway.

This campaign would end up stretching through most of the 1830s and would be a top priority for the company for most of that time.

The British official who would become most deeply associated with the campaign against the thugs was one William Henry Sleeman.

And interestingly enough, the man who penned that anonymous letter to the Calcutta Literary Gazette was also William Henry Sleeman.

In her book, The Strangled Traveler, the historian Martin von Werken argues that the Gazette letter written in 1830 represented an essential turning point in the history of the thugs.

Sleeman did not invent the idea of thuggy in India, but before that point, the concept had been a bit more nebulous.

For decades, the British authorities had been aware of murderous bandits who plagued the roads of central India.

Groups identified as thugs had been campaigned against in the past.

However, the phenomenon of thuggy had remained ill-defined.

Before 1830, it was quite common for those who were arrested on the suspicion of being thugs to ultimately be released for lack of evidence.

Or, as one British administrator poetically put it, the bandits were, quote, like a ball of quicksilver, which, if pressed by the finger, divides into many globules, all certain to come together again and cohere as firmly as before, end quote.

What made Sleeman's 1830 article so consequential was that he described a group that was dangerous and deeply frightening, but also identifiable.

Sleeman's thugs had a clear identity, a religion, and a base of operations.

Hell, according to Sleeman, they even had their own temple of doom.

This was not some mercurial group that could vanish into the central Indian countryside.

William Sleeman had presented every literate English-speaking person in India with a crisis that was definable and urgent.

As it would turn out, Sleeman would then present himself as the only person who fully understood this crisis and was able to fix it.

Indeed, Sleeman would go on to make himself into the world expert on thugs and thuggy.

He eventually published three books on the thugs, titled Ramasiyana, The Report on the Depredations Committed by the Thug Gangs of Upper and Central India, and The thugs or fant cigars of India.

Fant cigars was another term used for stranglers in India at that time.

These books would go down as the best known and most widely available sources on the phenomenon of thuggy in Central India.

For many years, it was simply assumed that all the available information on thugs had been filtered through the lens of the man who waged war on them.

Writing in 1995, Martin von Werken lamented that, quote, the only sources available are those written by Sleemann himself and by his collaborators in their struggle against the thugs.

Seemingly, no document exists in the vernacular that enables us to confirm, invalidate, or balance the colonizer's account, end quote.

For many years, this state of affairs made the study of thuggy fairly black and white.

Either you trusted Sleeman and left believing that the thugs were truly some of the worst people to have ever lived and their eradication was perhaps one of the better things accomplished by colonial rule.

Or you didn't trust Sleeman and you saw his writing about the thugs as an elaborate propaganda campaign that helped justify the expansion of British power deep into the Indian subcontinent.

From that perspective, the thugs were a colonial phantom, largely created by William Sleeman.

But thankfully, since the mid-90s, more research has been done that has given us a far more nuanced understanding of the situation.

Scholars like Kim Wagner have argued that by considering sources on thuggy from earlier in the 19th century, that is, the pre-Sleeman sources, we can get a clearer understanding of who the thugs were and where they came from.

Now, as you might expect, the exact origins of the thugs is controversial.

In the novel Confessions of a Thug, the fictional informant Amir Ali provides an elaborate origin myth for the thugs that places their inception fairly close to the start of time.

In the novel, Amir Ali explains, quote, I must tell you of the origin of Thuggi, that you may judge for yourself how ancient it is, and how well the instructions then given by divine command have been followed.

In the beginning of the world, according to the Hindus, there existed a creating and a destroying power, both emanations from the Supreme Being.

The creative power, however, peopled the earth so fast that the destroyer could not keep pace with him, nor was he allowed to do so, but was given permission to resort to every means he could devise to effect his object.

Among others, his consort Devi, Bawani, or Kali, for she is known under these names and many others, constructed an image into which, on this occasion, she was empowered to infuse the breath of life.

No sooner was this effected than she assembled a number of her votaries who she named thugs.

She instructed them in the art of thuggy and to prove its efficacy with her own hands destroyed before them the image she had made in a manner which we now practice.

She endowed the thugs with superior intelligence and cunning in order that they may decoy human beings to destruction and sent them abroad into the world, giving them, as the reward of their exertions, the plunder they might obtain from those they put to death, and bidding them be under no concern for the disposal of the bodies, as she would herself convey them from this earth.

End quote.

Pretty intense.

Did you catch all that?

So, in this version of things, we're told that the thugs are as old as humanity.

From the very beginning, they were devotees of the goddess Kali.

Further, we're told that the thugs believed that their murders were done in service of preserving the divine balance of the universe.

They murdered to make sure that the forces of destruction kept pace with the forces of creation.

Their method of killing, that is strangulation, was demonstrated to them by the goddess.

Pretty wild, right?

We're told that Kali creates a creature that she then kills in front of them, so the thugs know how to do it.

Further, the bodies of the thugs' victims were thought to act as food for Kali, who would then, quote, convey them from the earth.

Now,

obviously, this is an elaborate piece of mythology that few experts take seriously.

The better question is, did the thugs believe this story?

And interestingly, most experts say, no,

probably

not.

So, to get a better sense of the origins of the thugs, we should perhaps start with a little etymology.

For this, I'll turn to Kim Wagner, whose work on the thugs has been an invaluable source for this series.

Wagner explains, quote,

the literal meaning of the word thug in Hindi, thug, Marathi, tuck, Sanskrit, thugga, is cheat or swindler.

The term was translated similarly in early British works on Indian languages, as villain, rascal, and knave in Gilchrist's Dictionary of 1787, and as imposter and swindler in Drummonds of 1808.

In classical Indian texts, the word thug is commonly used to imply a deceitful villain or as an example of evil behavior and beliefs.

So the word thug is quite old and can be found in some of the most ancient Sanskrit texts.

Now, this could give the impression that a criminal society of thugs dates back centuries or even millennia.

Indeed, literary and cinematic thugs are often presented as devotees of an ancient blood religion.

As you heard earlier, the Indian actor Amrish Puri assumed that the fantastical thugs in Temple of Doom were based on an ancient cult.

But as Wagner points out, for most of history, thug was a fairly general term.

Any criminal, liar, swindler, or villain could be called a thug.

This makes pinpointing an origin for the alleged criminal fraternity of thugs quite challenging.

When experts comb through historical sources looking for references to thugs, they certainly find the word.

but it's often unclear if the word is referring to some general criminals or a specific group of stranglers.

For instance, one of the better-known origin stories for the emergence of thugs in central India comes from a biography of a 13th-century sultan.

Apparently, in the year 1290, the sultan of Delhi arrested and expelled from his capital 1,000 men identified as thugs, that is, T-H-A-G-S thugs.

But again, as Kim Wagner points out, it's deeply unclear if those thugs were simply run-of-the-mill criminals or if they were a fraternity of stranglers.

That story seems to echo another tale we have from thug informants preserved in the British records.

According to historian Mike Dash, a handful of thugs interrogated by the British in the early 1800s reported that their order dated back to the reign of the Mughal Emperor Akbar, who reigned from 1556 to 1605.

Now, for those of you that don't know your Indian history, Akbar is considered one of the greatest leaders of the storied Mughal Empire and is perhaps one of the most famous early modern Indian rulers.

According to those informants, the thugs were not expelled from Delhi, but instead from Akbar's capital at Fatapur Sikri in northern India.

The story goes that during the reign of Akbar there were seven great thug families who all lived in the capital.

These families, interestingly enough, were not devotees of Kali, but instead were Muslim.

We're told that the thugs were tolerated by the emperor until one of the thugs made the fatal error of killing Akbar's favorite slave.

In retaliation, all seven of the thug families were expelled from the capital.

From there, they moved south, eventually settling near the town of Itawa, which is in the southern part of the modern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.

It was in that region that the British would eventually encounter the thugs.

This story is interesting because it completely changes the religious orientation of the thugs.

The thugs are identified as a type of criminal clan, but they're Muslims.

They have nothing to do with Kali, and they certainly did not kill to sate the bloodlust of a destructive goddess.

But once again, our sources for that story are suspect.

Historian Mike Dash believes that that story should perhaps be given some weight as a legitimate oral tradition, but other experts aren't so sure.

Kim Wagner argues that the thugs as a cohesive group don't properly appear in the historical sources until 1809.

Thugs potentially existed before that point, but he isn't comfortable placing them any further back on the timeline than the mid-1700s.

So, whoever the thugs were, they were not part of an ancient cult.

Their roots do not extend back to Indian prehistory.

If thuggy existed, it was a product of the 18th century at the earliest.

Now, to understand the early British encounters with the thugs in 1809, I think we need a little historical context.

So, let's take a quick break, and when we return, we'll get into the specific historical moment that brought the thugs to the attention of the British colonial authorities.

It's no easy thing to summarize the rise of the British colonial state in India.

It's a complicated, often surprising story that deserves to be told carefully and with nuance.

And my goodness, I do not have time.

But to talk about the thugs, we need to talk about how the East India Company, which started out as a private trading corporation, created one of the world's largest colonial states.

But because I don't want to stray too far from the thugs, I'm going to have to give you a quick and dirty summary of that very complicated history.

So let me just say up front that there is more to this story, and I encourage you all to go learn more about it.

All right.

So the early 1800s represented an important turning point in the history of India.

By that point, the East India Company had been operating in the Indian subcontinent for a few centuries.

The English had first arrived as traders in the 16th century, eventually establishing themselves in the cities of Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta.

Now they were not the only European traders with a presence in the region.

The Portuguese, the Dutch, and the French also operated trading posts and eventually military forts around what we now think of as India.

However, in the early days, the Europeans didn't pose much of a threat to the established Mughal Empire.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, India's Mughal Empire was one of the richest, most populous, and militarily dominant empires on planet Earth.

In the 1500s, England was a tiny regional obscurity when compared to the mighty Mughal Empire.

One early English trader referred to his countrymen in India as, quote, fleas on the back of the imperial elephant, end quote.

The thought that England would eventually supplant the Mughals as the masters of the Indian subcontinent would have been ridiculous in the 1500s.

But if nothing else, history is ridiculous.

By the turn of the 18th century, things were shifting.

In 1707, the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb died after a long, if controversial, reign that had seen the empire reach its greatest territorial extent.

But this would prove to be the nadir of the Mughals.

After Aurangzeb, things slowly started to deteriorate for the Mughal state, which was capitalized on by the Europeans.

This also coincided with a leap forward in European military technology that now gave them an edge over Indian forces that had not existed previously.

By the second half of the 18th century, the Mughal Empire had broken into a number of different warring states.

The British East India Company threw itself into the middle of that conflict.

The company acted as a military ally for various Indian lords and princes.

In exchange for weapons, training, troops, and economic support, the company was able to demand concessions of land and other privileges from their erstwhile allies.

This paired with a few campaigns of all-out conquest, like the famous 200 Days that brought most of the Bengal region under company control, meant that by the turn of the 1800s, the British East India Company controlled huge swathes of the subcontinent.

So much, in fact, that in 1784, the British Parliament passed the India Act, which placed the directors of the company under the supervision of a government-appointed board of control.

After that point, the line between the actions of the company and the British state became pretty blurry.

Nevertheless, huge portions of the former Mughal Empire were still controlled by independent Indian rulers as the 1700s drew to a close.

But in 1798, a a man named Richard Wellesley became the new Governor General of British India, and his regime was characterized by a new level of imperial aggression.

In 1802, Wellesley seized on a pretense to get the British involved in a full-scale war against the rulers of Central India known as the Maratha Confederacy.

Now, this was not the first time the British had come in conflict with the powerful Marathas, but it would prove to be the most consequential.

The Maratha wars were brutal even by colonial standards.

While Richard Wellesley was successful in making the Maratha leaders accept British hegemony in the region, the war was completely destabilizing.

According to historian Mike Dash, quote, Great swathes of territory had been looted and burned, often more than once.

Crops had been seized, and forts, workshops, and looms destroyed.

Mile after mile of countryside had been depopulated.

The British had technically won the war and had added large chunks of territory to their growing empire.

But in the aftermath, quote, most of the lands overrun by the company's armies were now abandoned so hastily that they fell into what amounted to a state of anarchy.

Thousands of square miles were left effectively ungoverned, prey to famine, newly unemployed soldiers, and landholders forced to earn a living by their swords.

End quote.

This was the context in which the thugs appeared.

Lands taken from the Maratha states were now known to the British as the Conquered and Ceded Territories.

But as Mike Dash points out, much of that conquered and ceded territory was conquered in name only.

The old order provided by the Marathas had been destroyed, and a new British order had yet to take shape.

As such, this part of India became known as one of the most dangerous parts of the subcontinent.

South of the city of Delhi, you had this huge territory that, thanks to the Maratha wars, had become a failed state.

The roads through that region became a hotbed for banditry and murder.

It was in that time and in that place that the concept of thuggy was introduced to the British.

You see, whether or not you accept all the stories about the thugs or the existence of an organized thuggy cult, There's no denying that banditry became a way of life in the chaotic years after the final Maratha wars.

The wars brought famine and destroyed the local economy.

Banditry seemed like the only option for many people simply trying to survive.

In fact, the highwaymen and other bandits were known to share their spoils with their home villages.

In this sense, many who turned to banditry acted more like raiders for their communities.

One British administrator described it like this, quote, a crime committed by an individual of a village is perfectly disregarded by the rest, unless it be against the community.

If a man perpetrates a highway robbery in the sight of the village, he is as well received as before.

If he gives away part of his plunder, he is a patron, end quote.

Now, interestingly, that particular official was describing what he saw as a culture of criminality in the central conquered and ceded territories.

The fact that the people he regarded as criminals could be welcomed into a village to him seemed like complicity by the population.

However, I think it's easy to understand how in times of need and famine, a local person sharing their wealth, no matter how ill-gotten, could become a bit of a local hero.

But before we start valorizing every bandit in the region as a Robin Hood type figure, it needs to be said that many of these robberies went hand in hand with murder.

This was a legitimately dangerous time.

Many of those people who were robbed on the roads were also killed.

The first known reference to thugs from this period appears in a report written by one O.W.

Steer.

He was the assistant to the head British magistrate in the town of Itawa in the Doab region.

In 1809, Itawa, which is about 300 kilometers southeast of Delhi, was one of the few British strongholds in the region.

However, it was gaining a reputation among colonial officials for being lawless.

In April of that year, ten mangled bodies were discovered in the town's well.

What was worse, the local officials had no clue as to who might have committed this act of mass murder.

Then, just a few months later in July, four Indian soldiers or sepoys in the employ of the company were also murdered while traveling not far from the town.

This second set of murders caught the attention of the higher-ups in the company, who requested a full investigation and a report by Steer.

In the report, Steer admitted that things had been deteriorating in the Itawa region, and mostly blamed his boss, the magistrate James Law, for this.

However, he also included this paragraph, quote,

I shall not allude to a set of people denominated thugs, who have from time immemorial carried on their abominable and lamentable practices, as from the nature of their proceedings I do not conceive it possible to prevent immediately their covert and secret deeds.

But this evil is even now gradually lessening, and will no doubt, at no very distant point, be altogether suspended by the meliorating influence of a strict and vigilant police.

So, in this first known reference to thugs, this British official tells us that this group was in the Itowa area and was known to commit abominable and lamentable acts.

However, it's not clear if he thinks that they were behind these particular murders.

Interestingly, he also says that their evil was lessening and that it would soon not be a problem.

But then, a few months later, two more travelers were found dead on the side of a major road leading to Itawa.

Marks on the bodies revealed revealed that they had been strangled.

This latest crime prompted the magistrate James Law to write his own letter to his superiors.

In it, he declared:

It is presumed that the murdered persons were travelers who fell victim to that detestable race of monsters called thugs, who are constantly lurking in jungles and wastes, entrap any travelers who may be incautious enough to travel by night.

The thugs have invested the whole of the Doab, and this district in particular, from time immemorial, and they are so strongly leagued together that scarcely any instance has ever been known of their having betrayed each other's secrets.

Until means can be devised to extirpate these abominable pests of society and individuals can be prevented from traveling unfrequented places at night, murders will occasionally happen.

But what means are best to be devised for the discovery of those monsters and the prevention of the numerous enormities committed by them, I am unable to suggest, and I leave to others of greater knowledge and ability to apply the proper remedy to such serious and distressing evils.

Now, this letter is significant in the history of the thugs.

Here we have an official very clearly describing the thugs as a secret society of murderers who are, quote-unquote, strongly leagued together.

In this letter, Law specifically blames the thugs, who he describes as a detestable race of monsters who have been around since time immemorial.

for most of the region's calamities.

So, the big question is: how much did Law's letter reflect the reality on the ground?

No historians dispute that these murders were taking place.

The question is whether or not a secret society of thugs was behind those murders, or if they were unconnected crimes.

What's interesting is that before 1809, Steer's report, and Law's letter, there's no earlier textual evidence of thugs as an organized group.

And then they suddenly appear.

Now, if nothing else, these documents from 1809 demonstrate that William Sleeman did not invent the thuggy out of whole cloth in 1830.

The historian Martin van Verken's lament that the only sources on thuggy come from Sleeman is not true.

As early as 1809, you have the likes of James Law describing a secretive group of thugs committing murders and robberies in the ceded and conquered territories.

Another interesting aspect of these early descriptions is that they say nothing of the thugs' religious motivations.

There's nothing about the goddess Cali, nor is there anything about these murders that makes them seem ritualistic.

There also doesn't seem to be a consistent modus operandi between the killings.

In many ways, these thugs seem a little different than the thugs that would be described in the pages of the Calcutta Literary Journal 21 years later.

There's no denying that Central India was violent, chaotic, and dangerous in the early 1800s.

What we see in 1809 are British officials attempting attempting to diagnose the source of this chaos.

Interestingly, they did not point to the systemic disruption of traditional ways of life that had been brought on by brutal wars of conquest.

No,

instead they pointed to a particular group of criminals, a group they had heard had been terrorizing the region for centuries.

As far as they were concerned, the real problem here was the thugs.

Okay,

that's all for this week.

Join us again in two weeks' time when we will continue our look at the thugs.

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